Chapter 12

9 NOVEMBER 1769, MERCURY BAY, ON NEW ZEALAND’S NORTH ISLAND

Our old man came this morn according to his promise, with the heads of 4 people which were preservd with the flesh and hair on . . . the brains were however taken out as we had been told, maybe they are a delicacy here. The flesh and skin upon these heads were soft but they were somehow preservd so as not to stink at all.

BANKS AFTER SWAPPING A PAIR OF OLD UNDERPANTS FOR A HUMAN HEAD¹

COOK AND CHARLES GREEN wanted to observe another celestial phenomenon, the transit of Mercury, and they looked for a desirable location. On 9 November 1769, Cook anchored in the mouth of a ten-kilometre-wide bay on the eastern coast of what is now called the Coromandel Peninsula on the North Island of New Zealand. Banks joined them on their scientific mission, ‘without the smallest cloud intervening’.²

The Endeavour had arrived at the spot after sailing north past East Cape, where Banks noted that ‘The countrey . . . all round about appeard to be well wooded and pleasant’,³ though Cook soon used cannon fire again to ward off attacks from war canoes. There was cheating over trades for mussels and lobsters, and one Maori man laughed off a blast of bird shot in the back when he stole some linen from the ship and paddled to shore.

At the place Cook now named Mercury Bay, the local Maori – led by a good-natured old chief, Torava – sold the Endeavour crew an enormous quantity of mackerel and some dory. But while Cook, Banks and Green were on shore, other Maori arrived, and one made a mistake in not only cheating Lieutenant Gore, the senior officer on board, in a trade for cloth, but also by performing the haka in apparent defiance. Gore ‘shot him dead’⁴ and then frightened off the others with a cannonball over their heads.

Torava’s people retreated at first, but then came back and seemed to believe that the dead man had deserved what he got. A downcast Banks protested that a load of bird shot could have delivered the same message without the loss of life. The British were determined always to show they had the superior weapons.

Banks visited Torava’s people and watched them eat a supper of fish, crabs, lobsters and birds cooked on a skewer either over a fire or in ovens; these were holes in the ground filled with hot stones and covered with leaves and earth. He watched a woman mourning for a dead relative by cutting her arms, face and breasts with a shell, so that she was almost covered with blood.

Two days later, as Maori women delivered to the ship ‘a great number of crayfish of an enormous size’ that they had collected diving among the rocks,⁵ the Endeavour’s longboat returned loaded with oysters. The crew feasted for hours.⁶ The next day Banks and his party went ashore to see a Maori ‘fort or Eppah . . . the most beautifuly romantick thing I ever saw . . . built on a small rock detachd from the main and surroundd at high water, the top of this was fencd round with rails after their manner but was not large enough to contain above 5 or 6 houses; the whole appeard totally inaccessible to any animal who was not furnishd with wings . . .’⁷

A week later the Endeavour was in the Hauraki Gulf exploring ‘a very fine river broad as the Thames at Greenwich’. Beside the river was the finest timber Banks had ever beheld, ‘every tree as streight as a pine and of immense size’.⁸ One of Torava’s grandsons lived in the area, and the Endeavour men received a welcome that was ‘most perfectly civil as indeed they have always been where we were known, but never where we were not’.⁹ Tupaia was greeted as an honoured guest by many of the Maori, who knew he had come from the land from which their ancestors had travelled centuries before.

Once during trade with Maori in canoes, a young man came on board and stole a half-minute glass. Banks reported that Lieutenant Hickes ‘took it into his head to flogg him for his crime. He was accordingly seezd.’ But when the crew tried to tie up the man, the Maori on board ‘made much resistance’. They then began to call for their arms, which were handed to them out of the boats alongside the ship. Tupaia came on deck, and the Maori ran to him immediately; he assured them that their friend would not be killed, only whipped ‘on which they were well satisfied. He endurd the discipline and as soon as he was let go an old man who perhaps was his father beat him very soundly and sent him down into the canoes.’¹⁰

Two and a half years later, the French skipper Marc-Joseph Marion du Fresne¹¹ and twenty-six of his crew were killed and eaten by Maori near this very area.

During his stay, Banks watched as ‘several canoes came off and traded for fish but were most abominably saucy, continualy threatning us, at last they began to heave stone[s] with more courage than any boats we had seen’. As stones were hurled at Cook, he fired small shot at a man who was hit in the very action of throwing. Another canoe came up with the Maori throwing stones, and they, in turn, met another load of small shot ‘which struck several of them and at once stopd their speed’.¹² One man died with three pellets in the eye, which Banks supposed ‘found there an easy passage to his brain’. ¹³

Two days later, as Cook sheltered the Endeavour in one of the Cavalli Islands, he again fired the cannon to ward off threatening canoes. But when the visitors went ashore on a sandy cove 1200 metres from their ship, the canoes returned. Seemingly in an instant, six hundred armed men came charging over a hill towards Banks and his small party.

Cook and Banks marched boldly up to meet them. ‘They crouded a good deal but did not offer to meddle with us, tho every man had his arms almost lifted up to strike. We brought them towards the party and made a line signing to them that they were not to pass it . . . They now began to sing their war song but committed no hostility till 3 steppd to each of our boats and attempted to draw them ashore.’¹⁴ The Endeavour men opened fire with bird shot. One Maori tried to rally the defenders, waving his green stone club, but Solander shot at him until he ran away. More guns were fired, ‘none of which took effect farther than frightning them’, but then Hickes fired cannon blasts from the Endeavour, and the Maori retreated, leaving Banks and the others to gather ‘Cellery which was here very plentifull’.¹⁵

Cook later wrote, ‘In this Skirmish only one or 2 of them was Hurt with small Shott, for I avoided killing any one of them as much as Possible’.¹⁶ The show of firepower worked, though, with the captain now finding the Maori in that area to be as ‘meek as lambs’.¹⁷ Banks and Solander were able to botanise unmolested over the next few days, though Banks would remark, ‘I do not know what tempted Dr Solander and myself to go there where we almost knew nothing was to be got but wet skins . . . for it raind all the time we were ashore as hard as I ever saw it.’¹⁸

A week later, still tracking north, Cook named Doubtless Bay, after passing its entrance in bad weather but declaring that ‘doubtless’ it was a bay.

When more canoes came to trade, the Maori told Tupaia that at the distance of three days’ rowing in their canoes, at a place called ‘Moorewhennua the land would take a short turn to the southward and from thence extend no more to the West’. This place Cook concluded must be Cape Maria Van Diemen, mapped by Tasman. The Maori said that their ancestors had told them to the north-west ‘was a large countrey to which some people had saild in a very large canoe’. The voyage had taken them a month, and they had met people who ate hogs. Tupaia concluded they were ‘a parcel of Liars’, though modern scholars believe they were referring to New Caledonia.¹⁹

AS CHRISTMAS APPROACHED, foul weather and unfavourable winds pushed Cook west of the Three Kings Islands as he prepared to head south again to Cape Maria van Diemen.

When the wild winds and driving rain eased, Banks shot gannets and geese so that a goose pie could be prepared, as the men aimed to ‘keep Christmas in the old fashioned way’.²⁰ He happily noted that the ‘Goose pye’ was eaten with ‘great approbation and in the Evening all hands were as Drunk as our forefathers usd to be upon the like occasion’.²¹ On 26 December, Banks wearily scratched into his journal: ‘This morn all heads achd with yesterdays debauch.’

Little did anyone on the Endeavour know that just a few days to the south, near Tokerau Beach, more than a hundred Frenchmen were also celebrating Christmas. They were aboard the 36-gun St Jean Baptiste, which had left India six months earlier chasing trading opportunities in the South Pacific, especially on the mythical island Davis Land,²² which rumour claimed was populated by wealthy Jews. These rumours had grown with fabulous reports about Wallis’s voyage on the Dolphin.

The French crew, under skipper Jean-François-Marie de Surville,²³ had been ravaged by scurvy, but on 12 December 1769 they had sighted the west coast of New Zealand’s North Island just three days after the Endeavour anchored in Poverty Bay. De Surville had rounded North Cape and, heading south, passed through the area where the Endeavour had sailed a day or two earlier.

On 17 December the Frenchmen went ashore near Whatu-whiwhi²⁴, and a Maori chief provided fresh water, cresses and celery, which the sailors gobbled down to help their scurvy. Battles with malnutrition and the Maori intensified, though: de Surville’s crew burnt about thirty Maori huts before sailing on towards what their skipper hoped would be the safety of South America.

A HARD ‘SUMMERS GALE’²⁵ and sighting of Cape Maria ended 1769 for Banks, but better winds came as the Endeavour continued to sail south down the west coast of New Zealand. Just after daybreak on 13 January 1770, Banks gazed upon a stunning conical peak ‘thick coverd with snow’ and declared it ‘certainly the noblest hill’²⁶ he had ever seen. Cook named the wondrous beauty Mount Egmont in honour of John Perceval, the Second Earl of Egmont, who had supported the search for Terra Australis Incognita when he was First Lord of the Admiralty. The 2518-metre peak is now better known as Mount Taranaki.

The following day the Endeavour crossed to the South Island without any on board seeing the narrow passage separating the two islands that was more than a hundred kilometres to the east. Banks sighted a large Maori fort ‘which appeard crowded with people as if they had flockd to it from all parts’,²⁷ and while the locals appeared to be waving their welcomes, men in canoes were soon performing the haka and throwing stones.

One old man asked to come on board, although the others in his canoe tried to stop him. Pleased with his audience on board, he encouraged the visitors to go ashore on what is now called Marlborough Sounds, a spectacular region of many inlets and wooded hills. Banks and Solander found only two new plants, but the crew were pleased to find good wood and water, and they caught more fish in their large seine net than ‘all our people could possibly destroy, besides shooting a multitude of Shaggs’.²⁸

At the following daybreak, about a hundred Maori came to the ship ‘bringing their women with them, a sign tho not a sure one of peaceable inclinations’.²⁹ One Maori tried to take the price of his fish without surrendering them, and suffered some bird shot in his knee. Tupaia spoke with the Maori ‘about their antiquity and Legends of their ancestors’.

Cook ordered that the ship be eased onto the beach for careening: turning her onto one side to be cleaned and caulked at a place he called Ship Cove. After dinner Banks joined the captain, Solander, Tupaia and some crewmen as they steered a boat towards a cove about a mile from the Endeavour. They passed the body of a Maori woman floating in the water and soon learnt that she was a relative of a small group who were baking a dog on shore; it was their custom to bury the dead at sea, but the stone meant to carry her down had come loose.

Banks looked around at their food baskets and saw ‘2 bones, pretty clean pickd, which as apeard upon examination were undoubtedly human bones’ and ‘in the grisly ends which were gnawd were evident marks of teeth’. Tupaia translated for Banks:

        On asking the people what bones are these? they answered,

        The bones of a man.

        And have you eat the flesh? – Yes.

        Have you none of it left? – No.

        Why did you not eat the woman who we saw today in the water? – She was our relation.

        And who then is it that you do eat? – Those who are killd in war.

        And who was the man whose bones these are? – 5 days ago a boat of our enemies came into this bay and of them we killed 7, of whom the owner of these bones was one.³⁰

Cook was given ‘the bone of the Fore arm of a Man or Woman which was quite fresh, and the flesh had been but lately picked off’.³¹ According to Banks, the horror on the faces of his crewmen was indescribable, but he was glad to have ‘so strong a proof of a custom which human nature holds in too great abhorrence to give easy credit to’.³²

The next morning a small canoe came to the ship, and Tupaia asked those in it about cannibalism: ‘where are the sculls, sayd Tupia, do you eat them? Bring them and we shall then be convinced that these are men whose bones we have seen. – We do not eat the heads, answerd the old man who had first come on board the ship, but we do the brains and tomorrow I will bring you one and shew you.’

Banks was quite happy to eat birds instead. He shot ‘many shaggs from their nests in the trees and on the rocks. These birds we roast or stew and think not bad provisions, so between shaggs and fish this is the place of the greatest plenty of any we have seen.’³³ Over the next couple of days the men were involved in collecting fresh water, harvesting grass to feed the sheep that were still on board for meat, and cutting firewood for the forge so that broken ironwork could be repaired.

On 20 January 1770, the old Maori man returned with four human heads that contained ‘the Hairy Scalps and Skin of the faces’³⁴ and their earrings. Some of the eyes had been replaced with shiny stones. Banks offered to buy one of the four, and the owner demurred, ‘for tho he likd the price I offerd he hesitated much to send it up . . . untill I enforc’d my threats by shewing Him a musquet’. Banks swapped the head for ‘a pair of old Drawers of very white linnen’.³⁵ The head appeared to have belonged to a person of about fourteen or fifteen years of age, and showed by the contusions on one side that it had received many violent blows; part of the skull had been chipped off near the eye. Since the nearby land was without ‘the least appearance of cultivation’, Banks supposed the people lived ‘intirely upon fish dogs and Enemies’.³⁶

Banks and Solander went botanising in the pinnace in order to see more of the inlets that surrounded them. Cook instead went to the top of a hill ‘and in about an hour returnd in high spirits, having seen the Eastern sea and satisfied himself of the existence of a streight communicating with it’.³⁷ He had seen what is now known, after Banks’s insistence, as the Cook Strait separating New Zealand’s main islands. The skipper wanted to sail through the narrow channel, but foul weather kept him anchored for two weeks.

On the island of Motuouru, on 31 January, Cook hoisted the Union flag, named the waterway Queen Charlotte Sound, and took formal possession of it and the adjacent lands in the name of King George III.

A busy trade continued with the locals in the ‘Bones of men the flesh of which they had eat’,³⁸ with the Endeavour’s men swapping whatever trifles they had for these curiosities that would shock and astonish back home.

The visitors did not just buy souvenirs – they paid for sex, too. On 3 February, Banks reported, ‘One of our gentlemen came home to day abusing the natives most heartily whoom he said he had found to be given to the detestable Vice of Sodomy. He, he said, had been with a family of Indians and paid a price for leave to make his adresses to any one young woman they should pitch upon for him; one was chose as he thought who willingly retird with him but on examination provd to be a boy.’³⁹ When the British ‘gentleman’ complained, another partner was sent to him who on closer examination was also found to be a boy. ‘On his second complaint,’ Banks related, ‘he could get no redress but was laught at by the Indians. Far be it from me to attempt saying that that Vice is not practisd here, this however I must say that in my humble opinion this story proves no more than that our gentleman was fairly trickd out of his cloth.’⁴⁰

FOUR DAYS LATER, Cook set sail from Queen Charlotte Sound through the strait, battling unreliable winds and fast tides in a body of water still regarded as one of the most treacherous in the world. By 3 p.m. the following day he was in the Cook Strait’s southern entrance between what he called Cape Palliser, named after his long-time mentor, and Cape Campbell, named after the naval officer who had introduced the Yorkshireman to the Royal Society.

Cook then sailed north to Cape Turnagain, proving that they had circumnavigated the North Island. He now set about circumnavigating the South Island.

On 16 February, the skipper named a mountainous land mass in the distance Banks Island. Now known as Banks Peninsula, it is situated between the modern ports of Lyttelton and Akaroa.

The journey south was anything but plain sailing. Nine days later – off Cape Saunders, near the modern city of Dunedin – harsh gales whipped up from the south-west, and the next day they tore the foresail apart.⁴¹ On 27 February, Banks wrote that while the weather was ‘a little more moderate’, there was still ‘no standing upon legs without the assistance of hands: hope however that the heart of this long-winded gale is broke according to the sea phraze’.⁴²

The gales abated, and on 4 March ‘a large smoak’ was seen on shore, indicating many inhabitants, and ‘1 or 2 Penguins were about us that swam as fast as the ship saild making a noise something like the shreiking of a goose’.⁴³

Banks, and many others on board, believed that this land was part of a huge continent, perhaps the rumoured great Southern Continent, and the appearance of a great mass of land to the south seemed to confirm the theory. Within a few days, though, the Endeavour men realised they were rounding the southern tip of an island and that what they had seen in the distance was just a wide distant cloudbank, ‘much to the regret’, Banks admitted, of ‘us Continent mongers’,⁴⁴ and their ‘aerial fabrick’.⁴⁵

Cook now kept close to the west coast of the South Island as he completed his circumnavigation by sailing north. Each day Banks was enthralled by the heavily wooded country and the ‘Immense quantities of snow on the hills’.⁴⁶ But although he wanted to pull into a safe harbour so he and Solander could botanise, Cook said the winds would not allow it. Apart from naming a small island after Solander on 11 March, Cook was now doing the scientists no favours – or so Banks believed. Again, he would remember this with a degree of bitterness.

On 24 March the ship reached the northern extremity of the west coast and turned east to complete the circumnavigation – but the unfavourable easterly wind showed Banks yet again that ‘The sea is certainly an excellent school for patience’.⁴⁷ He and Solander finally went ashore on 27 March and again three days later, and while Banks was feeling ill with digestive complaints he still tramped up a mountainside to find three new plants.

Cook wanted to find much more. ‘This country’, he wrote in his journal, ‘which before now was thought to be a part of the imaginary Southern Continent, consists of 2 large Islands, divided from each other by a Strait or Passage of 4 or 5 Leagues broad . . .⁴⁸ As we have now Circumnavigated the whole of this Country, it is time for me to think of quitting it.’⁴⁹

The captain turned his little collier and her crew towards the vague notion of the still largely uncharted land known as New Holland.

James Cook’s remarkably accurate map of New Zealand showing the course taken by the Endeavour. This was published in Sydney Parkinson’s Journal of a Voyage to the South Seas. State Library of New South Wales

BANKS EXPERIENCED A SENSE of calming relief, in more ways than one, as fresh breezes carried the Endeavour west from New Zealand towards the island that Abel Tasman had named for Anthony van Diemen,⁵⁰ the Governor-General of the Dutch East Indies. Banks had been plagued by constipation, which he believed ‘most people are subject to when at sea’,⁵¹ and early in April 1770 a mixture of malt wort and breakfast wheat proved quite the tonic. The young scientist surmised that the mixture of ingredients created ‘a virtue similar to that of fresh vegetables, the most powerfull resisters of Sea scurvy known’.⁵² Jean de Surville could have done with some of this treatment: while Banks now had a pleasing regularity in his daily routine, the French skipper had reached the coast of Peru in search of fresh vegetables only to drown in a small boat as he headed to meet the Spanish viceroy at Chilca.

Cook had wanted to return to England by rounding Cape Horn ‘to prove the Existance or Non-Existance of a Southern Continent’. But he consulted about this with his officers and Banks. Such a course would mean pushing the Endeavour through a freezing ocean in ‘the very Depth of Winter’. The captain resolved that ‘the Condition of the Ship, in every respect, was not thought sufficient for such an undertaking’⁵³ and ‘for the same reason the thoughts of proceeding directly to the Cape of Good Hope’, on the southern tip of Africa, were also laid aside. Banks noted that while the ship still had six months of provisions, the sails and rigging ‘were renderd so bad by the blowing weather’ off New Zealand that it could not survive ‘the hard Gales that must be expected in a winter passage through high latitudes’.⁵⁴

Cook continued westward, now aiming for what vague maps and charts of the time suggested was the east coast of New Holland. He then planned to sail north to reprovision in Batavia in the East Indies. Banks acknowledged this was the best course to take, but it meant he and the others ‘were obligd intirely’ to give up their quest for the Southern Continent or what today is known as Antarctica, and Banks confessed that abandoning such an adventure caused him much regret because ‘that a Southern Continent realy exists, I firmly believe’.⁵⁵ He reasoned that something had to be down there because previous sailors had seen ice in large bodies off Cape Horn. But many other skippers, among them Luis Váez de Torres and Willem Janszoon,⁵⁶ had passed land off what is now northern Queensland, and Dirk Hartog and William Dampier had reached what is now Western Australia. None of that land had been explored by Europeans.

Banks contented himself with the possibility of new discoveries in New Holland and busied himself with a 15,000-word ‘Account of New Zealand’,⁵⁷ which included a chart comparing the languages of the North and South islands with Tahitian. He still couldn’t get over the cannibalism: ‘. . . nature through all the superior part of the creation shews how much she recoils at the thought of any species preying upon itself: Dogs and cats shew visible signs of disgust at the very sight of a dead carcass of their species, even Wolves or Bears were never sayd to eat one another except in cases of absolute nescessity, when the stings of hunger have overcome the precepts of nature’.⁵⁸

For more than two weeks, the Endeavour sailed west through gentle winds, with Banks relaxing on a sea ‘as smooth as a millpool’.⁵⁹ He observed ‘a red taild Tropick bird’, flying fish and porpoises, and he kept busy with his musket and fishing net. He shot an albatross that discharged a large quantity of a poisonous jellyfish, the bluebottle.⁶⁰

By 16 April, they were close to land. Tupaia showed Banks a large float of seaweed, Gore spotted a butterfly, and at night ‘a small land bird came on board about the size of a sparrow’.

But the following night, the Endeavour hit foul weather that charged straight up from the Southern Ocean. Parkinson feared men would be washed overboard as the ship pitched and rolled, the ‘broken sea’ deluging the deck with waves that towered to more than ten metres.⁶¹ It was as though the sea was trying to hide the huge uncharted land mass directly ahead.

Banks took the rough weather in his stride, more interested in the shoal of porpoises leaping about the ship ‘like Salmons, often throwing their whole bodies several feet high above the surface’.⁶² A more amazing sight would greet him with the next sunrise.